STERLING, Bruce

(1954-)

   US writer, essayist and editor, whose first published sf was a short story, "Man-Made Self", in an anthology of Texan sf, Lone Star Universe (1976) ed Geo W. PROCTOR and Steven UTLEY. His first novel,Involution Ocean (dated 1977 but 1978), is a memoir of the baroque adventures and moral education of a young man who joins the crew of a whaling ship sailing a sea of dust on a waterless alien planet. Sterling continued in this vein of moralized extravaganza with The Artificial Kid (1980), another first-person FAR-FUTURE picaresque. While its shockproofmilieu of glamorized youth, martial arts and omnipotent technology recalls the early work of Samuel R. DELANY, the novel also looks forward to the CYBERPUNK subgenre, whose principles and character BS largely defined inhis polemical FANZINE Cheap Truth (c1984-6) which he wrote and edited as by Vincent Omniveritas, and whose representative anthology Mirrorshades (anth 1986) he edited.BS's talent for rhetoric and his pre-eminence as sfideologue of the 1980s may have distracted attention from his own fiction. In SCHISMATRIX (1985), a 1-vol future HISTORY of the interplanetaryexpansion and transformation of the human race, he exchanges the fantastic exorbitance of his earlier work for a hard-edged and highly detailed realism closely informed by scientific speculation and extrapolation. Linked with SCHISMATRIX is the Shaper/Mechanist series of short storiesincluded in CRYSTAL EXPRESS (coll 1989), about a spacefaring post-humanity divided into two factions, the Shapers, who favour bio-engineering, and the Mechanists, who prefer prosthetics. The collection contains some of Sterling's best and most fully realized work; he has called it "myfavourite among my books". Stories not connected to the sequence have been assembled as Globalhead (coll 1992).Narrated by an anonymous historian above and beyond space and time, SCHISMATRIX is a homage to Olaf STAPLEDON, but all Sterling's novels may be seen as tours conducted aroundfields of data by protagonists whose main function is to witness them for us. This approach culminates in ISLANDS IN THE NET (1988), a NEAR FUTURE thriller concerned with the increasing growth and complexity of political power in electronic communication networks. Sterling's fascination with the inner workings of cultures foreign to his own also led to his collaboration with William GIBSON, THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE (1990 UK), an ALTERNATE-WORLD, STEAMPUNK novel in which the successful development ofCharles BABBAGE's mechanical COMPUTER in 1821 has produced a world divided between France and an 1850s UK ruled by a radical technocracy under Lord Byron; this UK is depicted as a DYSTOPIA whose visual squalor seems toreflect the influence of Charles DICKENS's apocalyptic vision of an industrialized land. And worse is to come: the eponymous computer is clearly en route to becoming an AI, and may end up ruling the world.Sterling is one of the most globally minded of North American sf writers, seeing civilization as an intricate and unstable mechanism, and pitting the search for equilibrium against our insatiable demands for knowledge and power; such concerns centrally govern the plot of Heavy Weather (1994), set early in the 21st century at a point when theecological degradation of the planet has generated storm systems of unprecedented ferocity. His main interest continues to be the behaviour of societies rather than individuals, and the perfection of sf as a vehicle for scientific education and political debate.

CG

   Other work: The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (1992), nonfictionabout computer crime.

   See also: ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF; CYBORGS; ECONOMICS; END OF THE WORLD; EVOLUTION; GENETIC ENGINEERING; HISTORY OF SF; INTERZONE; ISLANDS; JOHN W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD; MUSIC; OMNI; SLIPSTREAM SF; SOCIOLOGY; SPACE HABITATS; TRANSPORTATION; VILLAINS; WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION.